(This post contains spoilers, but honestly, they don’t matter at all.)
So I just saw The Protector with Tony Jaa. It was extremely entertaining. In addition to legitimately stunning martial arts (all done without wires), it featured:
-Our hero breaks up a drug deal in an abandoned subway car warehouse. The bad guy reaches over, blows a steam whistle, and all of the extreme urban sports enthusiasts in Sydney, all conveniently within about a 15 second bike ride/rollerblade/ATV drive, come crashing into the room, wielding flourescent light bulbs, and fight our hero while still riding/skating/ATVing. It was like the hockey players from Batman and Robin, except actually entertaining
-Our hero is attacked by so many consecutive thugs, who he disables by breaking arms and legs, that the entire floor of the room is littered with them, a la Kill Bill
And, best of all…
-Our hero busts into an evil press conference, where the new head of the evil criminal syndicate is announcing her corrupt evil deal with the mayor, and yells at her… (I have to do this mad-lib style):
“You killed my father! And you (verb) my (noun)!”
What did he yell, you may ask? Try to imagine something gloriously goofy beyond all precedent…
He yelled:
You killed my father! And you STOLE MY ELEPHANTS!!!
That’s right. Not just a singular elephant, but PLURAL elephants.
This was a great chop-socky flick. Paper-thin plot that they thankfully didn’t waste much time developing, but muay thai, kungfu, and capoweira galore.
The best part was a fight scene that lasted a solid fifteen minutes, working its way up a staircase that wound around the inside of a hotel atrium, up about six stories. Maybe 80-90 opponents in that time.
And it was done in a* single unbroken take*. Not a single cut in all that time. Tony was looking pretty spent by the end.
Highly worth the money if you like this sort of movie.
I totally didn’t notice that it was all a single take, but yeah, that makes total sense in retrospect. Best of all, he gets to the top, kicks the door down, and yells
WHERE ARE MY ELEPHANTS???
I don’t know why I find that so hilarious, but I sure do.
Also, props for the way they handled the big guy, played by Nathan Jones (who also plays the big American we’ve seen in the previews of the upcoming Jet Li’s Fearless). He was big and tough and even though you knew Tony Jaa was going to beat him in the end, they did a good job of not pussifying him, or having his defeate feel cheap or easy.
Ohhhh that’s why he looked familiar. He had a run on WWE a few years back. And was that a Jackie Chan cameo in the airport? I wasn’t certain, and I’ve been too lazy to google.
(I’ve been saying “Where are my elephants?!?” to co-workers all day.)
I haven’t seen this but I really want to. I imagine that it is very similar Ong Bak, which you need to see if you haven’t already. Ong Bak struck me as some sort of modern telling of an old Thai epic. At the very least the stories will have elements that are more recognizable to audiences in that part of the world, such as elephants.
And according to some trolls in IMDB, there was about 20 minutes of footage cut for the American release, along with dubbing and a new soundtrack. That does explain why the story is so disjointed.
It was fun. I saw a pirated version several months ago (a friend bought it in Chinatown), and the subtitles were for an entirely different movie, which made for an entertaining and hallucinogenic experience.
Didn’t hurt the plot at all.
The other movie (we think) was a high school drama set somewhere with a lot of Serbo-Croatians, because the dialogue contained a lot of “You’ve got detention!” and "(Speaks Serbo-Croatian)".
I loved the Jackie Chan cameo, and the Tony-walking-with-little-elephant scene. What the heck was up with the mythic Thai Warrior Elephant stuff?